Once again, I never said that the primary reason people learn things is to avoid embarrassment. That's ridiculous, obviously. Most people learn because they are interested in the world around them and enjoy interacting with it. Your supposition was that some people are not interested in some things, and I responded by asserting that most people choose to learn at least a bit about even the topics that they are not interested in. Total ignorance is an uncomfortable state for most people. Not for you, obviously, but for most people.
You have a bad habit of sniping when you lose points in an argument. You didn't say the primary reason was embarrassment, perhaps, but you invented a reason, without basis of course, why people will tend to learn things that don't interest them. And, of course, you failed to explain how the bare minimum of knowledge-to-avoid-social-embarrassment translates to adequate proficiency.
All I ever see are defensive anecdotes when people point out serious flaws in approaches like radical unschooling, even in the face of direct first-hand experience of homeschooled or unschooled kids who have been failed.
Yeah, I mean, if you want to define success as being happy, being an illiterate person who's happy not to go to college and work at the most menial jobs is something to aspire to. There are plenty of happy slackers out there; I've known some of them, perfectly happy to live paycheck to paycheck, smoke pot, play video games, etc.
I, for instance, am not interested in football, but if I go to a football game I'm not going to sit there moaning to myself. I'm going to figure out the rules, follow along, and try my best to enjoy it.
... which perfectly demonstrates the mechanism by which all unschooled children will prepare themselves for a rigorous academic life. They will study, or play at, whatever they like until college age, and then the embarrassment factor will kick in, bringing them all up to snuff in their weak or nonexistent areas, every last one. Including, of course, every last illiterate one, and every last one which knows no math, etc. Except, of course, for the ones that decide to become happy garbage people instead of going to college-- and there's nothing wrong with that. It would be their valid life choice, based on desire, not on anything else such as futility or lack of ability.
What people want for their children is irrelevant. What children want for themselves is what matters to me.
Logical much?
If my child would be happiest as a garbage collector, then I hope she chooses that career.
And that's the attitude that is quite obviously behind radical unschooling-- achievement doesn't matter much; it's freedom, as a pure ideal that can only be expressed by children making all the choices all the time, that matters, even if it comes at the expense of other things.
